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Gary Walton

Document Type

Article

Abstract

[First paragraph]

One of the most intriguing avatars of the "conspiracy theory narrative" is when the narrative eschews the designation of fiction altogether and adopts the trope of journalism. In fact, we can imagine any individual conspiracy theory narrative as adhering to a continuum which stretches from those narratives that are self-consciously packaged as fictions, such as The Da Vinci Code (2003), Foucault's Pendulum (1988), or The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) on one end of the continuum, for example, and those narratives that project themselves as putatively "journalistic investigations" on the other. On this end of the continuum, one could place Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil (2004), by Michael Ruppert, Barry and 'the Boys': The CIA, The Mob and America's Secret History (2001) by Daniel Hopsicker, and American Assassination: The Strange Death of Senator Paul Wellstone (2004) by Jim Fetzer among many, many others. These latter narratives are recent additions to a long, if not always honorable (or honored), tradition of conspiracy theory narratives that would include such notable examples as ­­ On the Trail of the Assassins (1988) by Jim Garrison (the New Orleans District Attorney who was the only man to bring an accused conspirator in the JFK assassination to trial), Rush to Judgment (1966) and Plausible Denial: Was the CIA Involved in the Assassination of JFK? (1991) by Mark Lane, and Crossfire: The Plot that Killed Kennedy (1989) by Jim Marrs. In the case of these works, the conspiracy theory narrative takes on the trope of the journalistic investigation and challenges the "official" narrative by offering an alternative to the dominant or accepted interpretation of "the facts" of the case. Moreover, these texts occupy a kind of cultural gray area between what Clare Birchall in her book Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip (2006) designates as "legitimate" and "illegitimate" knowledge (3). These narratives are both bounded by and resist "official" codes and venues that exist in the public arena for the production of public "truth." These narratives occupy a public space that Birchall has called "popular knowledge" [1]: i.e. a type of unofficial knowledge that helps individuals to "rewrite or re-cognize events, and perhaps more importantly, to reconfigure context (by bringing apparently peripheral narrative threads to bear [on the subject at hand]) and the boundaries of contextualization (when the knowledge employed to interpret and cognize a story becomes an integral part of that story)" (44). Indeed, such alternative narratives help readers negotiate the aporias extant in official narratives, whose evidence sometimes seems too full of coincidence, or the "available evidence is 'too present'" or when it is "implausibly convenient" (56). Thus, not only do these narratives offer a kind of limited resistance to the regimes of truth that dominate our culture, they offer traditionally disenfranchised individual information consumers opportunities to participate in the creation of public knowledge(s). Indeed, it is because conspiracy theory narratives have become so popular that we need to take them seriously as narratives. This is especially true when conspiracy theory narrative dons the trope of journalism and attempts to broach the divide separating "illegitimate" knowledge from "legitimate" knowledge. The purpose of this essay, then, is to examine the three conspiracy theory narratives by Jim Fetzer, Daniel Hopsicker and Michael Ruppert as narrative structures and discuss several important elements contained in them that not only make them unique but compelling to many readers. Moreover, by examining the trope of conspiracy theory narrative, and especially conspiracy theory narrative as journalistic trope, we can better understand its function as a counter balance to the power of the "legitimizing" force of the mass media in contemporary society and perhaps, more importantly, confront those narrative elements that bifurcate "legitimate" knowledge from "illegitimate" knowledge.

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